Wheels on the bus...

If you love music like me here's the great news: Songs are one of the best ways to create lessons. Pick up a song as a centre of your lesson and find, create activities related to the song. Wheels on the bus is also one of the traditional kids songs. I focused on vocabulary (verbs and words), and pronunciation (by singing). We sang and danced together. It was fun!

Here is the video and my worksheet. (I used google images to find pictures and I mostly prefer colourful pictures not photos to adopt my materials to kids' tastes). Don't forget, kids like dancing!

If you want to play the song with the guitar here are the simple chords:

D 

The wheels on the bus go round and round 

A                           D 

Round and round, round and round 

D 

The wheels on the bus go round and round 

A                       D 

All through the town

Little Red Riding Hood

I noticed that we were not reading much with kids, so as the best way of reading practice I decided to focus on traditional and popular stories especially universal ones. Little Red Riding Hood was on my bookshelf and I started to search for activities, worksheets or any thing related to the story. It was not difficult to find materials, but there was a problem: they were such a mass that I had to read and check all of them to plan my lesson. I think internet offers activities, worksheets, avitivities, ideas, and materials for teachers beyond measure, but deciding and planning are becoming  tough tasks day by day. Actually this is a proof that no matter how rich and accessible are all the ELT stuff, without a creative and researcher teacher who never shies away from trying new, they would be  simply useless. Anyway, lets have a look at my lesson plan with LRRH.

Lesson Plan

1. Warm up: Talk about stories and ask about students' favourite stories and characters. (Write story on board and add their favourites). Let them guess the story of the day with some key words such as: a girl, a mommy, a wood, a granny, a basket, a bad wolf, etc.

2. Then watch and read the LRRH. 

Watch the Story
Story

3. Do the following activities.
Activities

4. Play bingo. Click on the link below and prepare bingo cards for students and put teachers' cards in a small box or a bag. Put some happy or exciting music background. This is a fun way to recyle new vocabulary items. Play twive or three times by changing students' bingo cards.
Happy Background Music
Bingo

5. Do the activity "Guess Who?". A good way to talk about appearance. Then ask Students to describe each other. 
Guess Who?

6. Time for role play! You can prepare their masks in advance like I did or if you have time you can prepare the masks with your kids. Also you can print black and white masks and ask students to color their own masks. Do not forget to use some realia like flowers, basket, etc. and give kids some time to practice and focus on their prounciation and intonation. 
Masks (Coloured)
Masks (Black and White)
Play

7. Finally,in the feedback session talk about the best performance, and their favourite characters. 

Here are some photos from our lesson with LRRH. 

If you're happy and you know it...

"If you're happy and you know it" is one of the traditional kids songs. It's energetic and also great for teaching verbs.Actually it was difficult to decide which version of the song was better but finally ideal tempo and rich lyrics of the cover below persuaded me. 

In this version lyrics are long and many verbs can be taught in one song. Also the video has creative animation that students liked and they could follow the lyrics while singing, watching and dancing at the same time. By this way they could learn the lyrics quickly and written lyrics in the video made all these vocabulary memorable for them.Multicultural images and saying hello in many languages are very good ideas.I first wrote the lyrics and add a matching exercise as below: 

Say Hello,

Konnichiwa! Bon jour!

Privyet! Ni hao!

Kalimera ! Jambo !

Hao ! Guten tag !

Namaste ! Selam!

Buongiorno! Hola!

Vangaa!

Merhaba!

 Turkish             Japanese

Italian                  Chinese

Arabic                German

Russian                  Spanish

French                  Greek

African           Indian

Lesson Plan

1. Cut the lyrics in ten pieces.
2. Hand out the pieces of lyrics randomly.
3. Ask students to listen to the song (without video) and put the lyrics in the correct order.
4. Listen to the song again (with video) to check answers.
5. Read the underlined lyrics (verb phrases) and explain with your body, gestures, mimics, etc.
6. Ask students to match languages and "hello" expressions.
7. In an open group check answers and give feedback.
8. Watch the video, sing and dance.In short, enjoy the song.

Next week

1. Play the song and ask kids to sing together. (Encourage them to sing do not care about their pronunciation mistakes)
2. Ask students to sing in slow tempo, fast tempo, by whispering, happily, crying, etc. (Believe me this is a great fun and kids love it!)
3. Record their performance and finally watch or listen together.

If you'd like to play the song here are the chords: 

C                                                          G
If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.

                                                     C
If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.

F                                                           C
If you're happy and you know it, then your face will surely show it.

    G                                                      C
If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.


p.s. If you're happy with my ideas do it, and share your feedback please!;)

Hello!

Teaching young learners has always been an interesting topic to read about and study, but now it's time to practice. Although I've been teaching English for five years, I was really excited for my very first lessons with kids. I generally try different ideas in my lessons with young adults, and since they're not motivated in crowded classes I'm usually dissappointed. However, with kids I found that it's great fun to try new things as they are more open and really motivated, so I started to explore all songs, games, activities, stories, etc. again to create enjoyable lessons for my six little students. In this blog, I'm going to share all the materials I created or collected from  the internet. Also, I'm going to label lessons according to topics, write feedback from the teacher and students, put some photos of the activities. 

I believe that sharing ideas is valuable for teachers, and it's good to know that keeping records of my lessons will help me and any teacher around the world.